Germans take Fort Vaux

Before dawn on 2 June 1916 German infantry reached Fort Vaux, one of the ring of forts around Verdun, and seized its shattered superstructure and part of its ditches. The fort, however, did not fall. Its garrison under Major Sylvain-Eugène Raynal shut itself in the underground corridors and for five days beat off attacks with grenades and flamethrowers. The British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based records the capture of the fort under 2 June, but notes in a footnote that this is the German date and that the French held out in the fort until 7 June. On the morning of that day Raynal, whose men had had no water for several days, capitulated.

The fort that could not be taken by storm

Fort Vaux, smaller than Fort Douaumont, stood on a hill above the village of Vaux-devant-Damloup, about two and a half kilometres south-east of Douaumont. Before the war it had been strengthened with reinforced concrete, but in 1915, like the other Verdun forts, it was stripped of almost all its armament, and its only turret with 75 mm guns was destroyed in the first weeks of the battle. Even so, from March onwards it repelled German attacks. On 9 March a German communiqué even announced that regiments from Posen had taken “the armoured Fort Vaux”. This was untrue: the German soldiers had only reached the slopes of the hill, where they were wiped out. Over the next three months the fort and its surroundings were pounded day after day by thousands of heavy shells.

At the beginning of June the German 5th Army resumed its offensive on the right bank of the Meuse. On 1 June several divisions attacked the line from Thiaumont Farm to Vaux and took the advanced French positions in front of the fort. Since May the fort had been commanded by 49-year-old Major Raynal, an officer of the Algerian tirailleurs, wounded three times in the first year of the war, who walked with a stick and had volunteered to command the fort because he could no longer serve in the field. The normal garrison numbered about three hundred men and had supplies for that many, but when the Germans approached the fort, many soldiers from broken infantry units took refuge in it. Raynal later wrote that he soon had more than five hundred “mouths to feed”. Water was to be provided by a cistern which, according to the register, held about five thousand litres.

Fighting in the corridors

During the night of 1/2 June soldiers of the German 50th Infantry Division, among them detachments under Lieutenant Kurt Rackow of the 158th Infantry Regiment, passed through the wrecked wire and broke into the fort’s ditches. With flamethrowers and grenades they drove the French out of the caponiers at the corners of the moat and climbed onto the roof of the fort, but the French had blocked the corridors leading inside with barricades of sandbags. A fight without precedent in this war began. In dark, narrow passages less than two metres high, the two sides fought with grenades, machine guns and bayonets, and the air was filled with smoke and gas. The Germans took barricade after barricade, but could not reach the fort’s main chambers.

The last links with the outside world were carrier pigeons and light signals. Raynal had four pigeons. On 4 June at 11.30 a.m. he released the last of them, with the message: “We are still holding out, but we are being attacked with gas and smoke, which is very dangerous. We must be relieved urgently. […] This is my last pigeon”. The gassed bird reached the loft in the Verdun citadel and, according to French accounts, died soon after arriving. It was named Vaillant (“Valiant”), and the French army mentioned it in orders and preserved it as a memento. During the night of 4/5 June Raynal ordered the soldiers he did not need for the defence to leave the fort. Some of them got through to the French lines.

Water, however, proved the worst problem. As early as 3 June Raynal cut the ration to three-quarters of a litre of foul water per man, and the next day he learnt that the register had been wrong and the cistern was almost empty. From that day his men had practically nothing to drink. On 5 June, with the Germans still attacking, Raynal asked by light signals for the French artillery to shell the roof of the fort, where the enemy was sitting. By the same route he learnt that he had been made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. Between 5 and 7 June small French detachments tried several times to reach the fort, but they were stopped by fire and most of their officers were killed.

Capitulation

During the night before 7 June Raynal saw men in the corridors drinking their own urine from thirst, fainting and licking the damp from the walls. In the morning he sent a last message by light signal and surrendered the fort. According to French studies this happened at about 6.30 a.m. The numbers of prisoners given in the literature vary greatly, from about 250 to more than 570, because it is not known exactly how many soldiers had managed to leave the fort earlier. French accounts often repeat the story that German soldiers rendered military honours to the defenders as they came out, but the French historian Michaël Bourlet points out that German sources do not mention this.

What is certain is that the commander of the 5th Army, Crown Prince Wilhelm, received Raynal at his headquarters and praised the defence of the fort. Since Raynal’s sword could not be found (the major had only his stick and a revolver with him), the Crown Prince first handed him a German pioneer’s short sword and later a French officer’s sabre. Raynal described this meeting in a diary published after the war, correcting the version reported by the press. He remained a prisoner in Germany until the end of the war, and towards the end was interned in Switzerland.

The capture of the fort cost the Germans dearly. According to figures cited in studies based on German archives, between 1 and 10 June the 5th Army lost more than 2,700 killed, wounded and missing in the area of Fort Vaux. French counter-attacks on 8 and 9 June, with which General Robert Nivelle, commander of the 2nd Army, wanted to retake the fort at any cost, broke down under the fire of machine guns set up on its roof. After the fall of Vaux the Germans were only a few kilometres from the city and began preparing an attack on the last heights before it: Thiaumont, Fleury and Souville.